Employee Injury Accidents

Employers have a moral obligation to prevent accidents. Employees are the lifelines of any organization. Their safety and health play crucial roles in an organization s ability to create products and services for its customers. When employees safety and health are in jeopardy or are compromised through a lack of proper accident prevention, the organization itself becomes vulnerable. 

An organization s safety culture can also help to attract better qualified employees. Competition for the best qualified candidates has extended past salary requirements and into benefits and organizational culture. Job seekers in today s market have begun to focus more attention on nonmonetary attributes of potential jobs. For instance, benefits packages have become valuable compensation tools to attract and retain employees. An organization s safety culture can accomplish the same result. A strong focus and commitment to safety demonstrates that a company values its employees. 

Employers, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, Section 5(a)(1), shall furnish to each of [their] employees employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that cause, or are likely to cause, death or serious physical harm. More commonly referred to as the General Duty Clause, this statement provides a legally enforceable standard for protecting workers. If found in violation of the General Duty Clause, employers may be cited and receive substantial monetary penalties. 

Motor vehicles have become the primary mode of transportation for people and products in the U.S. Each year millions of drivers take to the roadways for business and leisure. In 1999, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that drivers traveled 2,691,335 vehicle miles. It is not surprising, therefore, that according to the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) there were an estimated 6,394,000 police-reported traffic crashes in 2000.  

Motor vehicle collisions are the number one cause of preventable deaths and injuries — which is not unexpected given the millions of miles traveled each year. In 2000, although the overall fatality rate was down to an historic low of 1.5 per 100 million miles traveled, 41,821 people were killed and 3,189,000 were injured in motor vehicle accidents. Despite popular perceptions, the majority of accidents occur in industries that rely on a mobile sales force or local servicing or deliveries rather than long-haul trucking. However, 

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The main types of fleet accidents are vehicle accidents, employee injury accidents, and off-the-job accidents. 

After the hazard assessment has been conducted and the data has been collected, it should be organized in a logical outline that will estimate the potential for employee injury The organized data will help to decide the type of hazard(s) involved, the level of risk, and the seriousness of potential injury The appropriate levels of PPE are then selected based on the hazard determination and the availability of PPE. The user should be properly fitted for the specified PPE, and the employer should make sure that it is comfortable to wear. Hazard reassessments should be conducted as necessary based on the introduction of new or revised processes, equipment, and accident experience, to ensure the continued suitability of selection of the proper PPE. 

No uniform standard of compensation of work-related accidents, the majority of enterprises to industrial injury accident compensation has many man-made factors and random factors, generally at a failed to follow State, the amount of compensation is generally low, and the compensation is often not in place in time. Conflicts between employers and employees in turn, affects the social harmony and stabiUty, and become an urgent social problems. Lower compensation amount, the objective is also to make some employers do not pay attention to safety work, or even ignore the occurrence of accidents, further exacerbated by the frequent occurrence of accidents, injuries caught in the vicious cycle, is not conducive to safety. Meanwhile, the workers life, health, safety and other legal rights are not adequately protected. 

To further explain the importance of identifying and correcting unsafe acts and unsafe conditions before an accident happens, the instructor should place Overhead 4 on the overhead projector. He or she should then explain that for every 600 unsafe acts and unsafe conditions that exist (bottom level), there will be 30 property damage accidents (level 2), 10 minor injury accidents (level 3), and 1 serious accident (top level). Again, the instructor should emphasize that if the 600 unsafe acts and unsafe conditions are corrected, the probability of a serious accident will be reduced. The instructor should ensure that all employees fuUy understand this concept prior to moving to the iceberg. 

Employee injuries or illnesses that arise out of and in the course of employment are usually considered compensable. These definition phrases have expanded such injuries and illnesses beyond the four corners of the workplace, to include work-related injuries and illnesses incurred on the highways, at various in- and out-of-town locations, and other such remote locales. These two concepts, arising out of the employment and in the course of the employment, are the basic burdens of proof for the injured employee. Most states require both. The safety and health professional is strongly advised to review the case law in his or her state to see the expansive scope of these two phrases. That is, the injury or illness must arise out of i.e., there must be a causal connection between the work and the injury or illness, and it must be in the course of the employment this relates to the time, place, and circumstances of the accident in relation to the employment (see selected case summary). The key issue is a work connection between the employment and the injury or illness. ... 

The fear factor and the blaming of employees for accidents are international occurrences. Most countries still gauge their industries safety performance by the number of injuries experienced. Most legal entities that enforce safety also measure an organization by the injury rates. 

Figure 4.4 (a) Fatal and major injuries per thousand employees, (b) Accidents reported per thousand employees among CIA members (voluntary sample). 

Like most heavy industry, the normal day-to-day operations of railroads poses risks of injury and death to those working on the railroads. In addition, major accidents such as derailments and collisions can also pose safety risks. These risks are imposed on employees as well as passengers, pedestrians, and automobile drivers. Derailments and collisions probably loom largest in the minds of the public. However, the most frequent accidents involve employee injuries. 

All of those injuries and illnesses cost a lot of money. In some fleets, employee injury costs rival or exceed costs for vehicle accidents. 

As with vehicle accidents, it s your job, as the safety professional, to identify the causes of employee injuries and illnesses, and develop and implement strategies and training to control or eliminate them. 

I find that what I talk about repeatedly, and I emphasize repeatedly, conveys to my staff the areas in which I mean to have snperior resnlts. They know by what I do that we are not to have employee injuries, environmental spiUs, customer complaints about product quahty, or transportation accidents. I thoronghly review every such incident. Fortunately, there haven t been many of them. 

Chapter 9 presents a new kind of comprehensive data on all injurious accidents (10-year time span) involving employees n = 13,000) of two large workplaces in Finland. This study mainly aims to clarify and assess the significance of risks among employees in different lost-time injury (LTI) accident categories, namely accidents at work, at home and during leisure lime, as well as when commuting to or from the work site. 

If a rough estimation is made of how employees use their time in the same categories, a comparison can be made as to which activity category is most hazardous if incidence of injurious accidents is the comparison criterion. Employees are assumed to work 8 h/day, 5 days/week, 47 weeks/year on average. Every day... 

Number of lost time injury accidents Number of non-lost time injury accidents Number of damage accidents (estimated) Employers liability premium ( 1.10 %wages) Number of employees... 

Accidents such as the one described above were the most typical risk to railway industry employees, but often these accidents remained hidden from the public gaze as they were rarely reported by the media. The media gaze tended to be reserved for major train accidents, most especially those affecting the travelling public. Employee injuries were usually only reported by the media when multiple deaths were involved or in the event of a train accident. 

The output from Stage (c) may be expressed in the form of individual risk or of societal risk. Individual risk is tiie probability of death to an individual within a year (e.g. 1 in 10 per year). Societal risk is the probability of death to a group of people - either employees or members of the general public - within a year (e.g. a risk of 500 or more deaths of 10 per year). Societal risks are usually given as fatal accident frequency rates (FAFRs). The fatal accident frequency rate is defined as the number of fatal injury accidents in a group of 1000 in a working lifetime (10 hours). 

Explosion and fire in the workplace that results in fatal/ serious injury accident at work High Senior manager Employees representative ROES Section managers Workforce Coroner Police HSE/local authority Trading standards Insurance company... 

Although neither a construction operation nor UK-based, the work of Du Pont is noteworthy. This company claims that several of its plants with more than 1000 employees have run for more than 10 years without recording a losttime injury accident. Du Pont uses 10 principles of safety management which are worthy of study ... 

Despite these improvements there was a great public outcry at the start of the century (Clark, 1974). The main reason was the expansion of the railroads which resulted in increased frequency and visibility of accidents. Between 1890 and 1910, train miles increased by seventy percent and passenger miles by 175 percent. While fatality rates did not increase over the period, the absolute number of casualties did. Total annual fatalities increased by half from 1890 to 1910 (figure 2.1). Over the same period the number of non-employee injuries increased threefold (figure 2.2), and the number of employee injuries increased fourfold. Clark notes that casualties were much higher in the United States than on comparable railroads in Europe. 

This chapter considers the economics of occupational injuries that do not occur during train operations. These comprise a quarter of employee fatalities and eighty-five percent of employee injuries. They typically occur during maintenance of track, in railroad workshops, and when employees slip and fall. Employee fatalities and injuries that result from operational accidents are considered later in the book. 

Single Event Theory — Common sense leads us to this explanation. An accident is thought to be the result of a single, one-time, easily identifiable, unusual, unexpected occurrence that results in injury or illness. Some still believe this explanation to be adequate. It s convenient to simply blame the victim when an accident occurs. For instance, if a worker cuts her hand on a sharp edge of a work surface, her lack of attentiveness may be explained as the cause of the accident. ALL responsibility for the accident is placed squarely on the shoulders of the employee. An accident investigator who has adopted this explanation for accidents will not produce quality investigation reports that result in long-term corrective actions. 

Fatal accident rate Lost-time injury rate Capital cost of accidents Number of plant/community evacuations Cost of business interruption Cost of workers compensation claims Number of hazardous material spills (in excess of a threshold) Tonnage of hazardous material spilled Tonnage of air, water, liquid and solid effluent Tonnage of polluting materials released into the environment Employee exposure monitoring Number of work related sickness claims Number of regulatory citations and fines Ecological impact of operations (loss or restoration of biodiversity, species, habitats)... 

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